


Butterfly

by Morwen_Eledhwen



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: But it makes me feel better, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, F/M, Friendship, M/M, Massive Plot Holes and Conspiracy Theories Ahoy, Sherlock Series 3 Spoilers, Sherlock and John Have Feelings and It's Awkward, There I Fixed It, Unresolved Romantic Tension, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-13 14:49:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1230460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morwen_Eledhwen/pseuds/Morwen_Eledhwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set just after the end of 'His Last Vow'. If you still haven't seen it or any of Series 3, thar be spoilers.</p><p>This is my attempt at a short fix-it fic for HLV, especially that damned 'goodbye' scene which left me flailing at the video. I won't say it completely fixes things, and I'm sure there are holes in my 'solution' theory that you could fly a small British government plane through, but that's not why I wrote this. This is just me attempting to coax some hope out of ground that's feeling a bit barren, at the moment. It's made me feel a bit better to write it; perhaps some of you will feel better after reading it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to **Bitenomnom** , who usually betas my work: I took too long (as always) to write this and got too eager to post to send it to her first for editing. So if this seems rough and not up to scratch, it's not her fault. It's only meant to be a little thing, anyway, and its roughness perhaps reflects the way it was born, which was as I was still half-asleep and lying in bed on the second morning after watching the Series 3 finale. Apparently my brain had needed some time to process things and had finally said, "No, we're going this way with that, thanks."
> 
> As always, this has not been Brit-picked, but I will always accept polite corrections on that or any aspect of my writing.

The wheels of the aeroplane bump once, twice, and then grip the tarmac as if to say: _got you, earth; you won’t be getting away from me this time_. We’re touching down. I’ve been in exile for a total of nine and a half minutes and the plane is suddenly scraping its wheels on _terra Britannia_ and taxiing to a halt. The door opens and the flight attendant who insists on continuing the pretense that he isn’t an MI6 agent assigned to ensure I don’t pull a daring escape opens the door and nods me through. I wave him out of my field of vision; my mind is occupied with _whowhatwhenwherehow_. Moriarty. Impossible. Someone purporting to be Moriarty: much more likely. _Whowhatwhenwherehow_ why. I don’t usually bother with _why_ ; that’s more John’s area, trying to understand people. Sometimes it’s necessary, though, if only as a clue to discovering _who_. Certainly rescuing me at the eleventh hour from a short-lived stint as bloodhound for the British Government will not have been their primary intent, whoever they are –though this Moriarty-clone may have cleverer, more interesting plans for me than Mycroft could devise. In any case, my new quarry is not the MI6 man whose irrelevant face I’ve already forgotten.

My brother is waiting on the tarmac, phone in hand, arm resting on the door of his government saloon car. I scan his face out of habit, but naturally it’s impossible to tell if he’s pleased to see me. Mycroft’s world, his life, his chance at what he calls success depends on his appearing to have no weakness, no exploitable emotion –no ‘pressure point’, as the late Charles Magnussen would put it. Mycroft would die before conceding to such a common ailment as familial affection. He hasn’t mentioned Sherrinford by name since the Incident; he hardly refers to him at all except as ‘the other one’. He uses my boyhood grief at the death of a family pet to mock and shame me into doing what he wants. And now I’m being shuttled away into his custody. For England. If she truly knew this man who has made himself custodian of us all.

He’d said my loss would break his heart. He was slightly under the influence, though he didn’t know it. I won’t know if it’s true. I gave up looking for evidence of my eldest brother’s love long ago. His arm is outstretched and the door is open, but there is no welcome here.

“Sherlock! Sherlock, wait!”

That voice, high and compelling: John. I can see him from the corner of my eye, a dogged black dot advancing up the tarmac. Behind him Mary, a petal-stroke of deep coral, follows as fast as she dares.

I look at Mycroft, who shudders and makes a face that says he could not personally stomach both a departure and a greeting between friends on the same day; but he oils into the back seat of the Jaguar without a word and turns his gaze to the line of trees that brushes the horizon.

John trots up and stands there with his breath coming in little glad bursts. He’s grinning; that placid plastic expression he wore earlier has cracked. In its place is his ‘we won again; isn’t it brilliant’ look. He puffs at me expectantly, eyes bright. He wants me to say something. I know he hates the pet analogies but he really is like a beagle at moments like this. All he needs is a word from me and a scent to follow, and he’s off. I don’t move my eyes from his face, but a splash of pink has appeared an estimated ten foot off his right shoulder.

“Change of plan,” I say to John. He nods, his grin slipping up a notch on one side.

“Yeah,” he answers, while his eyes and the tilt of his head say _Obviously_.

I go on anyway. “It appears I’ll be sticking around after all,” I say. “A rather urgent problem has arisen, requiring my particular combination of skills and insight.” Wait. Pause, rewind, replay, wince. “When I say ‘arisen’,” I add, “that’s actually a pun. Clearly unintentional—”

John chuckles. “—but appropriate, I know. Mycroft gave us the ten-second version.” His smile is warm, relaxed; he’s not worried. It’s disturbing. I can’t tell if his faith in my ability to defeat a man who really, actually, no magic tricks involved should be dead is staggering, or if the succession of lies he’s had to contend with recently has left him too jaded to care. I blink rapidly to clear my vision, but there’s still just John, and Mary somewhere behind, waiting for him.

I take a breath. “Well,” I say. “I suppose I’ll be rather busy, then, these next few –however long it takes.” I clear my throat. “I mean to say, you’ll understand if I can’t quite…” I make a vague gesture of association between us. “I realize there are conventions with friends when one of them is about to have a baby,” I say. “Visits and showers and the like –well, you probably didn’t expect me to do any of that anyway; but I would at least have given a passable approximation of interest, before; enough to convey—”

“It’s the expectant mother’s girlfriends who usually throw the shower, Sherlock. But yeah, I get the picture.”

“Hm,” I say, skeptical. “I might have assisted. From what I’ve observed of Mary’s girlfriends, I’m sure they could have used my help. But now—”

He coughs. “Mm, yes, very busy,” he says briskly. “Criminal mastermind risen from the dead, England in peril, all that.” He’s still smiling up at me. I’ve never seen the prospect of Jim Moriarty brighten John’s face in that way. “Well,” he says. “I expect you’ll catch me later, then.”

 _Catch you… later_.

When revelation hits, it’s often described as a _flash_ –and that’s true, in a way; from a normal point of view, it’s like the headlamp on a high-speed locomotive, driving science and inspiration between the eyes at a million miles an hour. Slow it down, though, and it’s much more elegant. No crude hammer, deduction, but a web of thought spinning across the mind; seeking, connecting. Streams of bio-luminescence linking this word to that person, this seemingly insignificant act to something massive. Something life-changing.

Or, as is so often the case when John Watson’s involved, life-saving.

Some previously shelved or indeed overlooked data in my Mind Palace are rearranging themselves in a pattern that temporarily takes my breath away.

 _Item 1_. That image on the screen, on all the screens: I know it. It’s a snapshot of the mastermind from the day of his trial. I remember that suit, lighter than I knew he typically wore, the hair carefully styled to look respectable, not slick or sinister. I served tea with that tie glowing innocently at me from my own armchair. Anyone with an Internet connection has access to pictures of Moriarty in that suit, from that day. John had a high-resolution closeup sent to him by some contact of Lestrade’s in the courthouse, at my request. We had a printed copy tacked to the wall of 221B until John ripped it down one night, snarling that he hated it ‘staring’ at him. I never saw that he’d deleted it from his laptop files, though. He’s as terrible about clearing his physical hard drives of old rubbish as he is his mental ones.

 _Item 2_. John had said, “The game is over.” I had been too muddled by sentiment at the time (embarrassing, unforgivable) to register how out of character that was. John only refers to ‘the game’ when a case is particularly trivial or ridiculous –or more frequently, as a sarcastic comment on my attitude toward situations ‘normal’ people would consider serious and/or troubling. He would never invoke ‘the game’ when saying farewell to his best friend –and I am that still, I think; he hasn’t informed me otherwise (do ex-best friends do that? I wouldn’t know. It feels like there should be an announcement. That woman had thought she was special to the Mayfly Man and then he’d just moved on, without even bothering to tell her he was done with her. That was wrong, wasn’t it?) John had looked me in the eye and said, “The _game_ is over.” He had leaned forward to say it, as though it was a secret; but because of our height difference he had been speaking more or less into my lapel, or my collar – right where he might guess (correctly, of course) that Mycroft’s minions had fastened a microphone while I was being prepared for launch into enemy territory.

 _Item 3_. Mycroft had arranged for our parents to visit during the short period in which I was confined at an ‘undisclosed location’ while my fate was being decided –whether as a favor to them or as punishment for me, I can’t be certain. I tuned out most of their prattlings and admonishments almost as soon as they breached the air of my cell, but I do recall my mother remarking on how John Watson appeared to have taken over the care and feeding of Bill Wiggins, now that I was gone. That did surprise me a bit, even knowing John’s nature as healer and comforter of broken spirits as well as bodies. He and Wiggins got off on the wrong foot and they’ve never quite warmed to each other. It’s possible Wiggins still hasn’t forgiven John his little burst of violence at their first meeting; possible that John will never fully accept a man he found in a junkies’ hideout and who has since conducted a regular acquaintance with me. Possibly –no, definitely—a bit of jealousy there as well, on both sides: Wiggins knows that no matter how clever he is at picking up the science of deduction, he’ll never replace John at my side; while John, even playing at ‘normal’ family life in the suburbs, resents anyone else being entrusted with my methods, with the Work. And Wiggins has made sure to let John hear about every new skill he’s learned from me –including the infamous trick of sending the same message simultaneously to a collection of unlinked mobile phones.

 _Item 4_. John kept looking around the airfield while we were speaking, before. I had assumed it was his natural distaste for emotional scenes, or possibly he was checking for those ubiquitous ‘people’ who might see John Watson and Sherlock Holmes making expressions of friendship and, Heaven forbid, talk. Replaying the scene now in my head, I can see it more clearly: that wasn’t John’s ‘I have feelings and they make me uncomfortable’ look; he _was_ scanning the area for people. The airfield has been empty all afternoon except for our little group in the middle; whom else could he have been expecting? Not someone who was already there, of course. A late arrival, then, coming in from outside. Someone to interrupt us.

 _Oh_.

I shake myself out of my head and find John still looking up at me, smiling. It’s his ‘any time you feel like rejoining us, Sherlock’ smile, but there’s little exasperation or annoyance in it. He knows what I’ve been thinking. It’s a smile from Before, unmarred by doubt or grief or anger. I like to think it’s a smile just for me.

“Yes, John, later,” I say, and it’s a struggle to keep from laughing. I clench my fists. “Now, I have a brilliant and dangerous man to hunt. The game continues!” I turn in satisfyingly dramatic fashion (the coat, which never fails to keep up, adds its particular flourish) and stride over to where Mycroft _et al_ are waiting. John’s dark chuckle follows me, tickling my ear.

Oh, John. Clever, surprising, wonderful John.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That same evening, Sherlock visits Dr. and Mrs. Watson to confirm his hypothesis.
> 
> Chapter 2 of now 3 chapters because it's me and I can't keep anything short, ever.
> 
> Once again un-betaed and un-Britpicked; the only one to blame for this is me.

There is tedious briefing and signing of agreements and an interesting meeting with Lady Sherwood in which she admirably but somewhat annoyingly does not allow her gratefulness to me for shooting Magnussen to override her sense of duty. At last I am set free… for a given value of ‘free’, anyway. Somewhat freer, once I find the last of the tracking and listening devices inflicted on me by MI6 and submerge them in a beaker containing approximately 174 mL of my own urine –fresh, obviously. I leave the beaker on the kitchen table at 221B. Mycroft will know, of course, and have everything replaced by morning along with much tutting and rolling of eyes; but he’ll let me have these next few hours. It’s not as if he doesn’t know where I’m going. He just doesn’t know precisely why I’m going there.

John has also been expecting me, if his face when he answers my knock is any indication. He scans the street and environs around and behind me –a useless gesture; there’d be nothing he could do even if he could spot whichever agents my brother has tailing me—and then nods me inside. Mary is in their kitchen, from whence come sounds of tea-making. I find it difficult to think of anything to say, and John’s face isn’t giving me any clues to go on. He’s wearing his businesslike expression, the one he gets when he’s digesting the facts of a particularly interesting case. From here, he could easily slip into the roles of captain or doctor or exasperated baby-minder to the world’s only consulting detective. I’m usually the one pushing him in the appropriate direction, but John Watson is not following anyone else’s lead today. He stands in the middle of his own sitting room with his shoulders back and his head cocked, as if listening for a cue I can’t hear.

Mary brings tea and we sit, I in a somewhat restrictive armchair and the Watsons on their hideous, unyielding plank of a sofa. John accepts his RAMC mug with a nod and brings it to his lips. His eyes over the porcelain rim turn to me, anticipating a remark, some kind of contribution. I’m still drawing a blank, my own mug a useless prop on the side table by my twitching right hand.

After many more seconds of silence, John sets his tea on the coffee table and settles back with his arms crossed high on his chest. He lifts an eyebrow at me in what I realize is his version of my ‘we both know what’s going on here’ look. I return my best shot at his standard nonplussed reaction face. We stare until he breaks, blinking through a sigh of impatience as he spreads his hands expectantly.

“Anything?” he asks.

Ah. He wants some acknowledgment of what he’s done. My fingers settle around the handle of my mug, from which I am now able to take a sip. I close my eyes into the steam and emit a throaty noise of contentment. When I look up again, John is watching me. The smile he’s fighting is the same as when he watches me flip my coat collar. I cough; I wish I could cross my legs, but the chair is too narrow. I fold my hands over my lap instead.  

“Well, clearly I was right,” I say.

His chin dips towards his sternum as he aims his warning glare at me from under a pointed set of brows. “Oh –no, Sherlock,” he says. “You cannot tell me you knew that _Moriarty’s face_ would appear on video screens all over Britain just in time to turn that fucking plane around—”

“No,” I answer, “that was entirely unexpected. I award you full marks for originality as far as that is concerned.”

“Uh, then what?” The tight smile now, that canny tilt to the corners of his eyes. “Are you saying now that you knew I was up to something? Because I _saw_ your face on that airfield, Sherlock. _You_ thought you were leaving.”

He’s trying to dampen an element of smugness in his countenance –probably feels it wouldn’t be appropriate—but he can’t , because he knows he’s right. I study the carpet between my feet for a moment. There were several beats on that airfield –words I uttered unthinkingly, a host of tells I let slip through—that I only allowed because I did indeed believe that I would never see John Watson again. Intellectually I know that I can trust him (this one man, if no one else) not to punish me for exposing myself in such a way. It doesn’t stop my brain from thinking of damage control, plotting ways to undermine, deflect, obfuscate. I will never be as generous as John, nor as foolish, nor as brave. I shake my head.

“Had me there as well,” I say with a glib expression that I know he finds annoying. “I fully admit that, were I ever to be asked for a list of likely culprits in a case of high-level technological sabotage, your name would be nowhere near it.”

He makes a snide sort of grimace in acknowledgment. “Cheers,” he says. I hear Mary snort but she’s out of my line of focus and I won’t shift it.

“It was Wiggins, of course, who managed it? At your request,” I ask.

“The broadcast itself, yes,” he answers, “but he’s pants at the creative stuff. I mean, just to get the—” he waves at the lower half of his face, where the pixilated jaw of James Moriarty had been made to vibrate.

“So that was—”

“Raz,” says John. I raise an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah; apparently he’s ‘branched out into the digital arts’. Easier to avoid the coppers that way, I imagine.”

“Well, I’ve never made a point of associating with the duller class of delinquent. And the voice?”

“Raz’s mate Steve,” says John. I frown; I don’t know a Steve. John sighs. “Another of the network. You might know him as ‘Deneb 5’. Some sort of underground DJ or something.”

“Oh yes, I remember,” I say. “He was one of the –that is to say, he was involved in my—” I wave one hand in a prestidigitatorial manner.

“Yeah,” says John, and coughs. “He told me. So I figured, you know, he’d be able to keep a secret.”

I nod; there doesn’t seem to be much else to say to that. _I’m sorry_ comes to mind, as it always does, and I wonder how many apologies it will take for that to stop.

“Anyway, he had all the recording gear, and a sound editing program to add distortion and change pitch and speed and all that. Amazing what you can keep in a small office trolley.”

I prop my chin on the tips of my index fingers as I process the data. “So yours was primarily a directorial role, then,” I say eventually.

He cocks his head. “Every good operation needs good direction,” he answers.

I can’t argue with that. John has been efficient and resourceful. “Absolutely,” I agree, and we both fall silent again.

“So,” he resumes after a moment, “you were right about—?”

“Mm? Oh; most things, of course,” I reply; this earns me a chuckle. “In this particular case it was that allowing you to know I was alive before I actually came home would have been disastrous.”

Mary emits a short incredulous yip. John can only blink. “I’m sorry?” he manages when his brain begins to reboot.

“Well, really, John,” I tell him. “If what I saw out there was your best impression of a man seeing his best friend off on a dangerous mission, never to be heard from again, then it’s as well I hesitated to stake your life –and Mrs. Hudson’s, _and_ Lestrade’s—on your ability to pretend I was dead for the length of time required.”

John makes an unintelligible choking noise. He turns to Mary, anticipating some form of support.

“Don’t look at me,” she tells him. “I’ve never thought of you as a master of deception, dearest, but that was… really quite pathetic. Sorry.”

John huffs at her. “Yeah, well, Mycroft didn’t seem to think anything particularly amiss, did he?” he says. “Didn’t even look twice at me; and you’d think if anyone was going to notice, his brother—” He's pointing at me.

“My brother,” I say, “made the same mistake he has made before, and far too often. He dismissed you as irrelevant.” John’s mouth goes tight on one side and the set of his jaw gets a bit dangerous. Why Mycroft persists in diminishing John Watson in his thoughts confounds me.

“If he had deigned to pay you any attention,” I continue, “he would have seen immediately that your behavior was odd.”

Again, John looks at Mary, who shrugs. “I thought you must have taken one of Mrs. Hudson’s soothers. Or more than one,” she says.

It occurs to me now that Mary may have been as much in the dark about John’s plan as I was.

“Well I hadn’t,” says John evenly. “And here we are.”

“Yes, here we are,” I echo. “But, John. Much as I appreciate et cetera and so forth, the thought behind and the effort involved… truly, I am –quite touched—”

John snorts heavily at this.

“—but really, even someone as accustomed to shallow plot points and impossible last-minute rescues as your film viewing history has clearly made you would know that this plan of yours can’t possibly work.”

John processes this with a blink, and then shrugs.

“It has worked,” he says simply. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

His sudden and utter vapidity makes my head swim. “Well, yes, John, _obviously_ ,” I snap, “but for how long? It won’t take even that lot more than a few days to discover there isn’t actually a threat. They already know it isn’t _Moriarty_ , for God’s sake.”

“But Sherlock, you don’t—”

I talk over him. He hasn’t thought this through; not his fault, his brain isn’t wired for scheming. Mine is ticking back up to speed, analyzing the situation. “And under normal circumstances, it’s true,” I say. “A few days would be more than enough. I could disappear easily, vanish; I’ve done it before, after all. But that’s the thing: it was only Mycroft and a very few others who knew, that time. _This_ time, _everyone_ would know; and the more people you have to fool, the more difficult it gets. People get careless, they let things slip—”

“Sherlock, would you—”

I shake my head. “If it was just Mycroft, it would be different; that’s the beauty of a minor government position, you see. So few mouths to feed, so little chance of the wrong bits of gossip getting out. So easy to lose a man in a file. But _all_ of the British government knows where I am now, John,” I say, and realize in a distant way that my voice has gone loud and a bit manic. “Or at least they know where I _should_ be,” I say, “and they know that I’m currently not _going_ there, and they are determined to know the reason why not. And all I can do is sit here and wait for the truth to come out and _hope_ that my brother can manage to keep you out of prison, and then it’s off to the wars I go after all—”

“Sherlock!”

John is shouting at me. My mouth snaps shut. I’m frozen in my chair passing tense _marcato_ breaths through my nose.

He waits. He is truly awful at this, by which I mean that John Watson has a terrible and unendurable way of gazing steadily at me and _waiting_ until he’s convinced that I’ll listen to him. This time the indignity is brief, as after only a few seconds he nods and resumes at normal volume.

“Give me some credit, will you please?” he says. “I may be an idiot, but at least I’m clever enough to _know_ I’m an idiot, unlike some people.” I smirk at this and his expression softens a bit further. “I knew I could never fool your brother,” he says with a wry smile. “Convince _Mycroft_ that Moriarty is still alive and wreaking havoc? Impossible. Not a chance. But that’s just it, you prat. I don’t have to. Didn’t you learn anything from this last case of yours?”

My mouth drops open, attempting to form declarations of pique or demands for clarification, but instead I suspect I look like a stunned grouper. John’s smile crests into his eyes.

“Look,” he says. “I know you exist on some rarified plain outside the world of media and the popular press. _Somehow_ , you’ve emerged from the last three decades of your life not knowing who Madonna is. You can watch crap telly and soak up all that rubbish as if there’d be a quiz on it tomorrow, and then just chuck the whole lot from your hard drive.” He waves his hands in a shooing-out motion and shakes his head. “You, consulting detective: you don’t _have_ to chat with the receptionist at work about the latest goings-on in the lives of celebrities or politicians or the Royal Family or any of that,” he says. “No one corners you over a pint and asks your opinion of the latest load the _Daily Mail_ crapped out. But I do live in that world, Sherlock. At least part of the time, I have to live in it. And I’ll tell you: he may have been a boil on a baboon’s arse, but Charles Augustus Magnussen was right.” He leans in, elbows on knees, and cocks his head at me like he’s sharing a joke.

“The return of James Moriarty, the villain of the century,” he says. “A story that good, that terrifying, that _sexy_?” He shakes his head again. “You don’t have to prove a story like that to sell it.”

I take a startled breath, and then another. There’s an answer here that John Watson knows. I’m not quite there yet; there’s still something I’ve just missed. But I do know the second half of Magnussen’s axiom.

“You just have to print it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah. This was supposed to be only 2 chapters in total but then stuff happened and like, words, man; and it seemed silly to have one 2,000-word chapter followed by a 7,000-word chapter, so I've split it. Don't worry, the dreaded Confrontation of Feelings will happen in the next (and absolutely, the last) chapter. Makes sense that these two would hem and haw for as long as possible before they got around to that, right? :D


End file.
